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Why didn’t Chief Bill Blair and his senior command just let their officers arrest the Black Bloc when they had the chance before the rampaging began?

Turns out there was no need to sneak in any fancy wartime laws!

There are aerial pictures of these punks all huddled together.

And it’s not like people didn’t know they were in town and what their intentions were!

“Just before all of that disgrace began, one sergeant went to a superior and said, ‘The Black Bloc are all together right there and we can take them all down right now,’ ” one police source said Thursday.

“You know what he was told? ‘We can’t touch them because they haven’t done anything yet!’ ”

So much for the need for special “five-metre fence” laws.

As Charles Adler said to me on his Sun News Network show Thursday night: “What, they didn’t want to violate the anarchists’ Charter rights?”

It is some irony in light of what happened later to the girl blowing bubbles and the guy with one leg and 1,100 people being locked up like animals despite never facing criminal charges.

And yet here’s this expensive report from former Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry saying Blair requested an antiquated Public Works Protection Act (PWPA) for “extraordinary” measures, powers that the federal government and the OPP did not think were needed.

At least that is finally cleared up because in the past the chief has indicated the request was driven by the ISU. In December he told me: “Our people working for the ISU (Integrated Security Unit) came forward with requests for that (and it) was passed through the city lawyers, and to the ISU and up to me.

“The request has to come from the chief of police and I signed it and the document was sent over to the ministry. It was articulated why the ISU felt it was important to have that authority and it was sent.”

Either way, police didn’t need it. What they needed to do was stop the anarchists and they were well-manned, well-funded and well-equipped to do just that.

But they decided not to.

Instead, the Black Bloc had their way with the city, including the demoralizing torching of police cars and extensive smashing of local merchants.

From there to restore their honour, humiliated police turned their sights on the girls from the suburbs and anybody looking alternative with all of their fury and firepower while breaking every Canadian civil liberty hallmark along the way.

I saw women shot with rubber bullets and others with their heads smashed into sidewalks but no one in power seems to care. It’s as if they were bugs and not free Canadians.

Forget all the lawyering and BS about a phony fence law that was interpreted by some as a licence to trample on the rights of the non-violent G20 protesters, working journalists or completely innocent passersby.

You don’t need reports (four of the six are in) to know things went wrong that weekend and to understand politicians don’t have the backbone to make it right.

Four strikes and no one is out.

First there was the damning ombudsman report, then the one from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, then the joint parliamentary report calling for an independent judicial inquiry and now the former chief justice essentially saying this fence law was all messed up.

The act “raises issues regarding the liberty and security of the person in providing for warrantless searches and stopping for identification,” wrote McMurtry, adding the “potential for abuse is beyond troubling, to say the least.”

There are still two more reports to come — one from the chief and the other commissioned by the Toronto Police Service’s board.

Hopefully one of them will interview that sergeant, as well as the other top brass, before they all retire and are no longer obligated.

Of course, no matter what, people realize no one in government will resign or be fired and lord knows Blair won’t admit to any errors.

It still doesn’t change the fact that one sergeant with a team of coppers with no special powers could have prevented the whole thing.